Jonathan Sarna

"Separate Pews in the Synagogue: A Social and Psychological Approach" (1959) By the time 31-year-old Norman Lamm published "Separate Pews in the Synagogue: A Social and Psychological Approach," in 1959, the issue of synagogue seating had been roiling American synagogues for a full century.1 Congregation Anshe Emeth in Albany, headed by another 30-something Jewish religious leader eager to make his mark named Isaac Mayer Wise, introduced this reform into the world back in 1851.2 When Wise's Albany congregation purchased a Baptist church and transformed it into a synagogue, it retained the church's American-style family pews, rather than expend funds to create a separate women's gallery, which every other American synagogue then featured. By 1890, mixed seating had become ubiquitous throughout the American Reform movement, justified on the basis of family togetherness, women's equality, conformity to local norms, a modern progressive image, and saving the youth for Judaism. R. Lamm knew that "the synagogue of the Conservative [Jewish Theological] Seminary itself ha[d] separate seating for men and women" (144). Clemens, Michigan, and New Orleans, as those seeking to preserve separate seating looked to American law to prevent the introduction of mixed pews in synagogues chartered to uphold the tenets of Orthodoxy. [...]what about equality in domestic litigation, making women "responsible for alimony payments when they initiate divorce proceedings, even as their husbands must pay under present law?" For all that he presciently observed the many inconsistencies propounded by mixed seating's proponents, he never imagined that demands for women's equality would in his own lifetime extend into the very realms that, back in the 1950s, seemed to him utterly "absurd."